Thinking about the end

A short essay:

I cross the railroad tracks into the Kalva slum, just outside Mumbai, India, along with my fellow volunteer teachers, our translator, and a security guard. The reek of garbage and feces hits us immediately, as though we just passed through a scent barrier that separates the slum from the rest of the town of Kalva.

We walk through a clearing covered in a film of fraying cloth, plastic bags, small trash fires, and stray dogs before arriving at our classroom. As soon as the four of us duck into the dark, tin enclosure, twenty children leap to their feet, shouting “Good morning teacher!” They reach out their little hands to yank on our arms and perform fancy handshakes.

This morning we are teaching a lesson on tadpoles, frogs, caterpillars, and butterflies. I sit on the end of a straw mat laid out on the concrete floor next to one of our students. He chatters to me in Hindi and looks perplexed when all I can say back is yes, no, the numbers one through ten, and teacherly requests: pay attention, move back, good job. The kids all imitate us, chirping “Sunoh, baitoh, listen, sit down!” and laugh at our pronunciation.

Our children are beyond eager to please, and they treat our smiles as rare treasures. Kids with dirt-streaked cheeks and non-ironically torn jeans, who don’t go to school, gather in the classroom doorway, and I ruffle their hair and shake their hands as well.

Later, I am seated on the mat next to the same student again, and when asked what baby frogs are called, he shouts “Tadpole!” I raise my hand to give him a high five, and he jerks away. I feel ill when I realize he thought I meant to strike him, and even as he sheepishly offers me his hand while I clutch my chest in apology, horror and misplaced guilt settle over me in a clammy sheen. I know there is much more to our students’ lives than what we see for an hour a day, and the bits I do glimpse can make me catch my breath.

But there are so many sweet surprises as well. I play a nature video on my laptop, and the kids scrunch together on the mats, leaning on each other’s shoulders, each nearly in his neighbor’s lap, in our laps. A little girl with red ribbons braided into her pigtails sits between her two older brothers, the eldest gently stroking her hair. When I grin at her, she smiles back, then at her brother, tickled at our exchange.   

I have been teaching in India for a month, and in a few short weeks, I’ll leave these lovely children and return to lawns, air conditioning, and carpets. I’ll think of them here when monsoon season begins, as a sea of plastic bags and crushed cartons washes down the road, and they settle onto a mat in a classroom where I will no longer be.

Story Time

First of all, PSA, if you’re interested in receiving an email every time my blog updates, just submit your email address in the box at the top of the blog, and you should be all set!

Second of all, to lighten things up (even though I'll get serious again afterwards), a story of adding money to my phone here: I went around the corner to the store/booth/street-front room where you can both add money to your phone plan and drop off your dry cleaning. Obvious business plan, why did I never think of that? So I gave the guy my phone and a 100 rupee bill and told him the name of my sim card carrier. He said to me, "100 rupees, 86 rupees of talk time." I said, "Where do the other 14 rupees go?" He drew me a little chart that looked like this:

Paid rupees  Rupees of talk time

80                        80

100                      86

110                      110

Then he said, "So either 80 or 110." I said, "Why?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "That's crazy!" He said, "Yes. So 110?" Naturally. This is just the latest in a series of strange and amusing quirks about India. 

         

This week, we’re running lessons focused loosely around the theme of self-expression, and today’s lesson was about stories and storytelling. First, we explained the difference between fiction and non-fiction and had the kids categorize some stories, including a biography of Ghandi, a movie starring the Indian heartthrob Salman Khan, and Life of Pi (our synopsis: tiger and a boy are trapped on boat, tiger is hungry, tiger doesn’t eat boy, real or not real?).

Next, we read them a picture book that I put together yesterday. I thought it would be a breeze to write a children’s story, but all of the illustrations took forever! Fortunately, I had some help coloring them in. Our plan was to read them the story and translate it line by line, but for each line I read, the translation seemed to turn into a paragraph. So I ended up asking the kids what they thought was going on according to the pictures they saw, and then I added in bits of the plot that they missed. Interactive is definitely the way to go here.

The next part of the plan was to have the kids create a group story, where one student starts with one line, then another student adds another, then another, and so on. In our first class we ran out of time for the activity, but we gave it a shot in the second class. At first, I was really nervous the game would fail. First of all, the class seemed more antsy than usual today, maybe because it’s been getting so hot. Plus every time the train goes by (multiple times per class), the noise is super distracting. Getting them to sit in a circle was a whole to do.  Then, I called on a girl arbitrarily, and she thought I was asking her to tell the story I’d just read to the class. Commence confusion.

After a couple more false starts, a girl who is a frequent and enthusiastic contributor stood up and proceeded to begin a story, that kept going, and going! I don’t remember it exactly, but it involved a boy and a girl drawing in a garden and ending up at a lake. Her younger brother, who is usually very quiet, volunteered to continue the story. He stood at attention with his arms tight at his sides, and in a slight, lilting voice, he told of how the boy was thirsty, and he wanted to drink some water from the lake. The problem was that there was a hungry crocodile swimming in the lake as well. The boy didn’t know what to do, because he wanted to drink some water, but the crocodile was going to eat him.

At this point, the first girl took the story back, saying that the boy decided to trick the crocodile by taking a stick and throwing it in the water. The crocodile couldn’t tell the difference between the stick and the boy, so he ate the stick, and meanwhile, the boy was able to drink some water and get away safely. THE END.

I was so shocked and relieved that this sneaky story came out of our generally rowdy classroom. Even though the kids were messing around while I was trying to explain the instructions (granted, in English), they were engrossed by the tales of their own classmates. I felt like a proud mother!

Running lessons where you aren’t sure you’ll really reach the kids is scary. It’s overwhelming to have to answer to perplexed faces, and failing feels like a waste of the little time we have here to make an impression. But all the same, I’ve been saying to myself that if even two or three kids out of a class of twenty decide to read more stories, write more stories, or read a newspaper instead of play with it, that it counts as a step to success. The lessons that are the hardest to teach might be the most important. 

לא עליך המלאכה לגמור, ולא אתה בן חורין להבטל ממנה.

It isn’t your job to complete the work, but you are not free to ignore it, either.

The Nest They Know

In the morning in the slums
trash heaps down the slope to the railroad tracks
slim pickings for goats among cloth rags, crushed cans, plastic in all forms.
Our tin classroom takes me by surprise every time we come up on its
two concrete steps, a pile of cheap sandals inside the doorway, to a chorus of,
"Welcome teacher, good morning teacher!"
Moony brown eyes and little, rotten teeth
My tooth fairy income could have fed them for a day.

The train clatters toward the big city past the doorless classroom entrance:
Button down shirted call center professionals, students, sari-clad women all,
leaning out compartment doors, pomegranate scarves twisting in the draft,
numb to slum scent. 
It passes and we resume our lesson on international food and music,
wild galloping to American country and slithers to Australian didgeridoo;
we finish with the Indian national anthem.

We are rock stars leaving the classroom,
slum kids too poor for school wave shyly at the white people in sneakers with sweaty feet.
Two boys play under fruit-laden tables with a stray dog, another goat.
Teenagers glance at us, quizzical,
men double-take with no shame, tobacco spit spraying dusty road.

We leave the line for rice and oil rations,
trays of peas drying in the sun,
crowds of school-aged idle boys playing marbles in the street,
mounds of trash in all directions
for the hill-top town of Matheran.

Rising out of Mumbai smog by a road weaving up the mountain,
finally greenery, the drama of valleys, peaks,
nature that isn't polluted, over-sized ponds bordered by lawless intersections,
beauty in India beyond women's garments--
the nation they sang about.
They likely will never see this, 
maybe not even the urban lakes just outside the toxic nest they know.
Only goats, and garbage. 

In general, I don’t really like it here.  I hate not being able to walk around alone. Not that women don't do it at all, but I'm uncomfortable enough that I’ve been wearing sunglasses around just so that my eyes are a little more difficult to find. Plumes of dusty exhaust burn the back of my throat while we’re walking through traffic, and this may seem insignificant, but our apartment ran out of filtered water two days ago, so we’re boiling water instead. It’s really that any one of these things seems like it should be manageable on its own, but when you group them together with the overall culture shock and challenges of living with many people, I wonder how I’m going to make it through the next seven weeks.

I’m down to the last few food items I brought from home to eat on the plane, and I’m disproportionately sad about this. I had a bag of snack bars, but I think they were mistakenly thrown away.  Tali made me a batch of cookies for the plane, and I finished the crumbs out of the baggie with a spoon.

I woke up this morning realizing I’d dreamt about a baked potato with avocado, so that’s my next meal.  I must have been delusional thinking I would be totally good living on rice and cooked vegetables for two months straight, three meals a day. I wasn’t even planning on eating raw vegetables or fruits here, but that insanity ended. Today for lunch I made a salad of chopped cucumber, pear, and hardboiled egg. Kind of weird, and not super filling, but at least it made me a little less thirsty. Celiac is lonely here. At least the two people who are so strictly kosher can meal plan with each other. Maybe this trip will be an exercise in being hungry. I’ve never been long term hungry before. Very fortunately, Leah (who is here for the year kind of coordinating us) is super knowledgeable and sympathetic and said she'd be my cooking buddy.

Today was our first day visiting the students in the slums. We had to cross railroad tracks to get there. Ba dum tshhh. As we made our way towards the slum, a stream of people, mostly men, were passing us in the opposite direction, heading out to work and school. Almost all of them were dressed rather smartly, in clean button-ups and jeans or khakis. They looked like anyone you’d see walking down our street or through the mall, highlighting the fact that the line between living in a slum and in a middle class neighborhood is so, so fine. As one of our staff pointed out, in India, middle class doesn’t mean comfortable, it means living hand-to-mouth and having just enough, with nothing to spare. Anyone with less simply doesn’t have enough.

Our first stop was at a women’s collective, where the women were rolling out chapatis, or flat bread, and cooking them as the mid-day meal for our students. I couldn’t go in because of the flour in the air. Afterwards, we walked through the slum to the first classroom. As soon as we appeared in the doorway, the students hopped up off the floor and chanted together, “Good morning teacher!” with the cutest rolling R. Teach-ehr. In a single classroom, there are around thirty kids from ages five to thirteen. Some of them are pretty good at English. And then several kept trying to speak to me in Marathi. I would just say my name a few times in a row. I’ll have to work on an alternative response. I told them my name means tree, but then they thought my name was Tree. Fail.

We tried playing a rhythmic clapping name game, and the rhythm didn’t really translate, but the kids had fun. They have the best smiles. I was sitting next to three siblings, and the sister kept hiding her face in her brother’s stomach. In the next class a little girl wouldn’t let go of my arm. The last classroom was tiny and dark, and they were the only group of kids who had never worked with a group like ours before. They were more reserved, but they counted to one hundred, sang happy birthday, and recited a rough version of “one, two, buckle my shoe.” Not too shabby.

To those of you who were in touch earlier this week, it was so nice to hear from you. Keep sending me love and happy vibes! Hope to write more in a couple days.

Most sincerely,

Tree